Freedom and horror: et al. and Newell Harry at Yuill/Crowley

Newell Harry, (Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notes, 2015–16, installation view, ‘575 / TWO PROJECTS: et al. and Newell Harry’, Yuill/Crowley, Sydney, 2020; courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

In these days of germophobia, of latex gloves and cashless transactions, the idea of ‘shelling out cash’ can fill us with horror. All those unknown fingertips spreading a network of possible contamination! Indeed, if the COVID-19 crisis has told us anything, it is that the very systems that have unleashed our global interconnectedness – international travel and currency exchange – have also allowed safe passage for the coronavirus.

Art, of course, is another system of exchange, and the idea of walking into a gallery at the moment, either for the purpose of viewing or purchase, can also fill us with horror. Yet that is exactly what I did last Saturday, making an appointment to see the latest show at Yuill/Crowley in Sydney. For much of the visit I was the only member of public in the gallery: just me facing a line of black-and-white photographs and a wall of blankets punctuated by a plinth of shells and, at the back of the room, a small video work.

Viewing art (under controlled circumstances of course) is one of the most perfect activities for social isolation, not unlike the playing of tennis. Observing a respectful distance while remaining alert to things that lob or spin unexpectedly is all part of the game. With the duet of works by et al. and Newell Harry that has been so carefully curated by Ewen McDonald, it was difficult at first to determine the rules. The photographs were by Harry, and they depict episodic scenes of Pacific Island life, framed with typed diary entries, pidgin-style, continuing the Sydney artist’s fascination with the poetic mashing of Melanesian culture. Across from the photographs were et al.’s blankets, scribbled with words like ‘STOLEN’ and roughly hung with black tape and entombed behind clear plastic.

The plinth of shells offered a clue – one of the objects of exchange in the elaborate gift ceremonies of the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of Papua New Guinea. Here Harry found himself on a research trip in 2015, contemplating the uselessness of his credit card. In the Trobriand Islands, shell money is not used as barter in a western sense of commodity, but is passed along in a chain of giving, always returning to the original owner in a circular kind of dance. Harry’s resulting work (Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notes (2015–16) finds something freeing in this shedding of materialism, and in a wordplay that forever hovers in-between.

Helping unpack the freighted emotion of et al.’s blankets was the New Zealand artists’ accompanying video here and now! (2020). To interior scenes of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the Gertrude Stein story about a father instructing his son about the cruelty of collecting butterflies could be heard. The story ends with the father going against his own advice and killing a moth to impress his son. Cruelty and kindness are not that far removed, Stein seems to say.

As is the case with et al.’s blankets. These, in fact, refer to those given to Aboriginal mission children in centuries past, and here inscribed with quotations from the 1997 report into the Stolen Generations, Bringing Them Home. These felted palimpsests record yet another system of exchange, but one cruelly and tragically unequal. It is a contagion made visible, and a reminder why art should not be quarantined but experienced in the flesh, to unmask our horrors, and to free us too.

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney